while looking in chelsea galleries i stumbled upon the george adams gallery, which was displaying a survey of paintings by jose bedia. i had previously only seen one of his paintings at the los angeles county museum of art and had made a mental note to look at more of his work. what a nice thing to run into a whole gallery filled with his paintings. link to the gallery’s description of bedia’s work.
A new article by Vogt and Magnussen (PubMed ID:17357707) was discussed at the site Cognitive Daily (note to self: add to Bloglines account). The article describes research to examine what artists and non-artists focus on while looking at an image. They found that psychologists (or, non artists, as they are called in the article) tend to focus on identifiable components of an image while trained artists do not necessarily focus their eyes on the objects in an image.
This article is a nice attempt to get at how artists see, and by this, get at how artists think. The images in the article (found at Cognitive Daily) clearly describe the eye paths by the artists and non-artists.
Some reactions to this article:
the SERU working group has put together a draft of best practices (titled SERU Framework–version 0.3); it is posted on their website at http://www.niso.org/committees/SERU/index.html. this draft provides a clear outline of what the issues are in communications between libraries and publishers regarding gaining access to subscribed electronic content. i heartily support efforts that lead us away from murky license agreements toward clear and simple usage guidelines.
if you go to the site listed above you will see that you can join their listserv, if you care to stay informed of SERU’s progress.
a researcher had her work accepted for publication in 2006 in a prestigious journal, but instead of it being published in a 2006 issue it was published in a 2005 issue. the 2005 issue was published in 2006. in this way, the date of publication could have been before the researcher even began the research.
i wonder how you would report that publication in an annual report, assuming that the publication was done as a result of some grant funding. it could possibly look like the researcher published on grant-funded research outside of the granting cycle.
p.s. publishers do crazy things sometimes.
p.p.s. this is an example of the strange scenarios that present themselves while one is sitting at the reference desk.
when i first started working at this medical library i was heartily disturbed when i would pass by books with graphic images on the covers. if the book is about a particular technique – let’s use open heart surgery for example – there will often be a picture of it on the cover. intellectually i know that this is what medicine is about, but it’s still quite something else to be presented with the very real, very photographic visuals.
to combat my visceral reaction my mantra has been, “don’t look at the pictures, just look at the text.” but just like those awful “family circus” comics, my eye is drawn to the images whether i want to look at them or not. a curious thing is happening as a result; i am beginning to feel less repulsion and more curiosity as i spend more time around these books. i still have a long way to go with the dental books that come in, however. check back with me later to see how i’m progressing.
awwww, my hometown is number 4 on cnn’s best beaches to look for shells (http://www.cnn.com/2007/TRAVEL/03/08/bil.cl.shelling.beaches/index.html). a snip from the article says that “When cold fronts roll in from the north, experienced shellers bundle up and hit the beach.” i have many pictures in my photo album of me in varying states of growing up, bundled into a winter coat (with hood, for wind protection), carrying a shell bag. we would frequently go during the winter, as the beach was not disturbed then, and we could find whole sand dollars tucked into the dunes.
more about galveston may be found at this website: http://www.galveston.com/default.asp
